Kotoamatsukami

Crows sometimes brought ill omens and sometimes good fortune. But if one appeared now, it might bring nothing but Uchiha Itachi's greetings.

Uchiha Itachi had not released a crow, though. Every one of his little crows should have stayed obediently where it belonged, not appeared in the real world.

Then it had to be a wild crow native to the Land of Rain. But surely the fighting just now had driven off every wild animal nearby.

Obito looked up. Uchiha Itachi did too. Both stared at the crow in the sky, at the black pattern in its scarlet eye.

The black pattern swelled and spread, filling Uchiha Itachi's mind and Obito's alike.

"Hey!"

Uchiha Itachi was startled to find another version of himself beside him. The other Itachi patted his shoulder, scaring him with almost childish glee.

"You?! How did you get in here?" he asked.

"How should I know..." The other Uchiha Itachi shrugged. He claimed to know nothing, but Uchiha Itachi could tell at a glance that he knew exactly what was going on.

"All right, stop looking at me like that..."

"If Shisui did something to this eye before I was brought back through Impure World Reincarnation, there was nothing I could have done about the eye Danzo stole, far away in Konoha."

"How are you any different from samurai?" Kakashi's Itachi curled his lip and raised his voice.

"You might even be worse than samurai. No convictions, no beliefs. You just drift wherever the current takes you."

It was something he had planned and prepared long ago. When the time was right, the crow carrying Kotoamatsukami would take flight into the night sky and use that powerful dōjutsu, capable of reshaping a mind, on himself or someone else.

Almost everyone froze: Kakashi's Jie, Tsunade, Orochimaru, Jiraiya,